Watermill - Ben Hur

22nd June to 28th July 2012.

Review from Newbury Theatre.

Ben Hur. At the Watermill. With four actors. How? What
we actually have (and this is where it gets a bit complicated) is four good
actors playing four bad actors playing 12,059 characters. The best way I can
describe it is the Farndale Avenue Life of Brian.

While the title role is played by handsome dashing
Alexander Berkin (played by handsome dashing John Hopkins –
I told you it was complicated), the rest of the parts are
taken by (real names) Elizabeth Cadwallader, Nick Haverson
and Andy Williams and inevitably this leads to chaos and
much swapping of wigs and costumes.

The essence of the Farndale Avenue genre of coarse acting
is good acting combined with impeccable timing, and we
certainly got that, along with impressive props and special
effects.

Nick Haverson was wonderfully versatile, ranging from
bucolic gatekeeper through Roman centurion to Jesus. The
appropriately named and recently qualified actor Sally
Wiggins (Elizabeth Cadwallader) displayed her assets well as
the love interest, whilst struggling with at least four
wigs. Eric Morecambe lookalike Andy Williams played Ted
Fletcher, drafted in at short notice to replace an
indisposed (or was it deceased?) member of the cast, in a
delightful opening scene where he knew none of his words.
Alexander Berkin (leader of the Compagnie de Berkin theatre
company) struggled manfully to keep the show on the rails.

The first half was hilarious, with the jokes and the
slapstick coming thick and fast. The humour tailed off a bit
in the second half, but we had the chariot race (sadly
without real horses) to compensate.

The play was written and directed by Patrick Barlow and
Sean Foley, who both have an impressive pedigree in stage
productions, notably with The 39 Steps and
The Ladykillers, and I could see the
National Theatre of Brent’s influence in the voiceovers.

As a high-budget, no holds barred spectacular, it isn’t
quite there (yet), but as a joyful and hilarious night out,
and a lesson for amateur groups on how to do coarse acting
really well, Ben Hur is unmissable.

PAUL SHAVE

Review from The Daily Telegraph.

My, but this is very silly. We knew it would be, of course. How
could a cast of four, jostling together on one of our smallest stages,
tackle Ben Hur? However you approach it, whether in the form of General Lew
Wallace’s original 1880 novel or Hollywood’s behemoth film version of 1959,
filmed to the then record-breaking tune of $15m - it’s a story that’s as
biblically epic as they come. Bonkers idea!

Patrick Barlow - a familiar face from The National
Theatre of Brent and responsible too for that larky
long-runner The 39 Steps - has joined
forces, as director and writer, with Sean Foley, who gave
the West End the Morecambe and Wise homage, The Play
What I Wrote. You know where they’re coming from
but even so, it’s faintly amazing how tongue-in-cheek the
fruit of their labours is.

Anyone seeking any vestige of reverence will need to look
elsewhere. Though the programme states categorically - and
presumably for sound legal reasons - that this show bears no
relation to the MGM classic, it plainly summons memories of
it only to trample them underfoot in a puerile rush of
incorrigible japery. This is an evening emptied of meaning
and filled with mock-meaningful looks.

In a way, the source inspiration here is “the rude mechanicals” of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The basic premise is that a
motley crew of thesps are biting off far more than they can chew and
soldiering on despite being woefully ill-equipped.

The sets are flimsy, the accents wobbly, the wigs fall
off whenever they can, cues are more missed than not. We are
placed in the inexpert hands of “Compagnie de Alexander
Berkin” - a ham actor of irrepressible egotism. John Hopkins
who plays him, and Hur, has hunked-up specially for the
part, and with his glistening sinews could give Charlton
Heston, or at least a Chippendale, a run for their money. In
his skimpy toga, he almost passes muster as competent next
to a clueless actress fresh from a dance course at Dudley
Tech (Elizabeth Cadwallader), an Edinburgh Fringe veteran
(Nick Haverson) and a panic-stricken bloke from the
Watermill (Andy Williams) who has stepped in at short
notice. These supporting buffoons all row for dear life in a
host of roles, but cheap stuffed mannequins are relied upon
too to bulk up the numbers. The chariot race? That’s best
left as a surprise but it won’t be winning any awards. I
don’t believe anyone died in the making of this venture but
I imagine there was plenty of corpsing in rehearsals.

Sometimes it’s frightfully funny, sometimes it’s just
frightful. I think that’s the point. It’s an over-extended
sketch flogged to within an inch of its life. There are
jokes so lame not even Christ could heal them. “Chicken,
Messala?” runs one of the gags inevitably directed at Ben
Hur’s old bosom-buddy turned Roman Empire stooge when he
comes visiting. If you don’t like 'em like that, steer well
clear.

DOMINIC CAVENDISH

Review from The Times.

Gather round, children of the digital age, and learn that long
before computer-generated fantasy battles, my generation thrilled to
huge-cast movies such as Quo Vadis, The Ten
Commandments, Spartacus and, above all,
Ben Hur, with Charlton Heston muscling his way from betrayed
Judaean to galley slave to Golgotha convert.

A marvellous essay by Patrick Barlow, famed for his
two-man National Theatre of Brent and the long-running
The 39 Steps, recalls adoring the film with
its 50,000 live extras and 78 horses. As a boy, reading the
original book by the otherwise forgotten Civil War general
Lew Wallace, Barlow dreamt of making his own version and
including the bits Hollywood left out.

Now he has. In two hours, as four performers struggle
with wobbly props and endearingly incompetent puppetry, the
bijou stage sees an epic tale of love, betrayal and
pre-Christian politics, including a Roman sea battle and the
famous chariot race. An obvious thread of its humour is a
joke on stage pretensions: Barlow frames it as the vanity of
one man, John Hopkins, as the hunky, eponymous founder of
the Compagnie de Alexander Berkin, cornering the muscular,
shirt-off role of the hero (phwoar! as we critics say).

Nick Haverson is hilariously kaleidoscopic, not least as
a camp Emperor Tiberius. Andy Williams is supposedly a
stagehand press-ganged into being assorted soldiers,
jailers, a Roman admiral who can’t sit down without
garotting himself with his huge breastplate, and Ben Hur’s
old Mum, with and without stick-on leprosy.

Williams scores first, drawing non-stop ripples of
laughter after an opening scene in which he is too terrified
to speak his lines but clings to a plywood column, shaking.
In his heavy, black glasses, he looks like the late Eric
Morecambe. But then, the co-director, Sean Foley, was
responsible for The Play What I Wrote, so
no surprise there.

The show works a treat, and it will get even better. The
theatre spoof and props disasters are reinforced, though not
quite often enough, by beautiful parody of the grand style
favoured by General Wallace. “I have not heard my own name
spaken for five years,” cries the hero, and “I must unwaken
and — er — be to my destiny.”

Bathos is helped by sneaky background use of the Miklós
Rósza epic score. And yes, the sea battle is tremendous. And
the chariot race, I am happy to say, very silly indeed.

LIBBY PURVES

Review from the Newbury Weekly News.

An epic cast of... four

Patrick Barlow's Ben Hur is a hilarious romp through Roman times

Ben Hur, at The Watermill, until Saturday, July 28

Need cheering up? Go to The Watermill, where the 'Compagnie of Alexander
Berkin' (aka John Hopkins) are performing a zany, gloriously funny version
of the old story. While I suspect many of the audience had gone wondering
how the famous chariot race was going to be achieved, as soon as John
Hopkins stepped on to the stage to introduce his 'stars', it was time to get
out the handkerchiefs and wipe away the tears of laughter for it was clear
this was going to be a very, very funny production.

John Hopkins (famously seen as Scott, Barnaby's sidekick in Midsomer
Murders) appears as a gorgeously over-the-top Judah Ben Hur wearing, for
most of the production a short (very short) tunic, revealing mesmerising
legs, honed by chasing TV villains.

In the original silent film there were said to be 125,000 actors. Now
there were four including, Hopkins/Berkin told us, Ted Fletcher (Andy
Williams) who allegedly stepped in at the last minute and hilariously,
throughout the first half, spoke sparingly as Mrs Hur.

Since there was a lack of some 124,996 actors, everyone played several
parts and Elizabeth Cadwallader is excellent as Sally Wiggins, who plays
Hur's sister and also his lover, servant girl Esther (do keep up). Coyly
waving, she tells us that she is really a dance student and throughout
suddenly breaks into whirling moves, as well as improving a trio's sand
dance with just a touch of the Michael Flatleys.

Then there is Marcellus, Hur's boyhood chum who turns against him,
convincing him that Eros is out and Mars is in, much to Esther's fury. Nick
Haverson playing Gavin Seed playing Marcellus (still with me?) is
uproariously funny in all the roles he undertakes which include the
occasional appearance as Jesus, buying loaves and fishes. It is he, of
course, who with Ben Hur takes part in the chariot race and no, I am not
going to tell you how this is achieved.

Adapted by Patrick Barlow from General Lew Wallace's novel and directed
by Barlow and Sean Foley, this is epic mixed with bucketloads of panto. In
the hands of four terrific actors it comes off superbly well.

CAROLINE FRANKLIN

Review from the Guardian.

In the style of National Theatre of Brent classics such as
The Charge of the Light Brigade and The Messiah,
Patrick Barlow and Sean Foley's adaptation of General Lew Wallace's novel,
about the clash between the Prince of Judah and Rome, is daft as a brush.
Alas, there is no megalomaniac theatre director Desmond Oliver Dingle on
hand, but the self-regarding and earnest actor-manager Alexander Berkin
(John Hopkins), who believes in "an epic theatre that can bring about real
social change", is a good substitute. In this play-within-a-play, everything
that can go wrong does.

The conceit of a bumbling theatre company staging a play badly is old
hat, of course, but this show is a lark. Though it lacks the visual wit of
Barlow's long-running West End hit The 39 Steps, there are
bonuses – including audience participation in a Roman orgy with Maximus
Sexiest Tiberias, and some good jokes: Jesus loses an arm during the Sermon
on the Mount, and there is considerable confusion as to whether he is a
"fisher of men" or just a strong-tasting cough lozenge.

How funny you find it depends on your taste for silliness, but this
audience went wild for the experimental dance troupe of "nearly nude nubile
Nubians" and cheered to the thrills of the chariot-race finale, performed –
like most of the show – with a manic ingenuity.

A quick-changing cast do the work of thousands, with Elizabeth
Cadwallader, Nick Haverson and Andy Williams's inept thespians acting the
galley slaves to Berkin's whip-cracking star turn, the smouldering Ben Hur.
This miniature epic may not be the greatest story ever told, but it's
lighthearted fun – and as we all know, he or she who laughs, lasts.

LYN GARDNER

There are reviews in the
Oxford Times ("hilarious production"),
Marlborough People ("a great summer's evening out"),
The Good
Review ("perfectly calibrated comedy... the energy never flags...
joyous comic gem... deserves to follow The 39 Steps and
The Play What I Wrote into the West End" - five stars) and
WhatsOnStage ("one of the funniest evenings in the theatre this
decade... tears of laughter all evening and a whole lot of curtain calls" -
five stars).